Music

Alberta Ballet to tour edgy Tragically Hip show All of Us next year

The company is taking its blockbuster hit ballet All of Us, based on music by The Tragically Hip, on a national tour for five weeks next year.

It’s just the latest success for the growing national company amid a year of stunning premieres and deserved successes.

Alberta Ballet artistic director and choreographer Jean Grand-Maître, in conjunction with Live Nation Canada, announced Friday that they will bring All of Us to new audiences across Canada in the spring of 2019, including multiple performances starting in May in Hamilton, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. The Calgary shows will be June 14 and June 17.

Grand-Maître’s full-bodied dance tribute to Canada’s archetypal musicians scored considerable critical success when it opened in Calgary last May, not only with audiences but also with the band, who hailed the work’s faithful authenticity and creative power in keeping with lead singer Gord Downie’s unique musical spirit.Downie died over a year ago and the country still has not stopped mourning his untimely loss.Grand-Maître’s ballet should go a long way to helping Hip fans heal.

The ballet is set as a post-Apocalyptic story that is emotionally involving for audiences, matching recordings of The Hip’s memorable performances and Gord Downie’s unforgettable lyrics perfectly to Grand-Maitre’s boundless, energetic choreography of equal artistic power.

Alberta Ballet’s show All of Us, featuring the music of iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip, will go on national tour in 2019. Courtesy, Paul McGrath

All of Us tells the story of two warring clans who battle to reshape a new society, fighting wars of good versus evil in a bid to see who redesigns the future.The storylines feature important subjects of love and clan togetherness pitted against some intense dance combat scenes, exhausting by any measure of dance training and rehearsal.

Grand-Maître found inspiration for All of Us in both current events and films such as Mad Max and Blade Runner. The post-apocalyptic drama features a dynamic soundtrack highlighting 20 iconic songs from The Hip’s legendary 30-year anthology, re-purposed to best effect in a futuristic landscape featuring a riveting dystopian narrative.

“This is very exciting for all of us at Alberta Ballet to take the music of The Hip on tour, thanks to their very generous management and to Live Nation Canada,” Grand-Maitre said.

Addressing Downie’s lyrics and the intensity of the music set to his uniquely philosophical perspectives, cast within a poet’s soul, Grand-Maitre had this to offer:

“Beyond the Canadiana we usually attach to the music of The Hip, there lies a whole other universal wisdom which speaks, through its extraordinary simplicity, about humanity’s true inner potential.”

Alberta Ballet’s show All of Us, featuring the music of iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip, will go on national tour in 2019. Courtesy, Paul McGrath

Alberta Ballet will continue its touring presence on the national scene when it travels with its famous production of the Joni Mitchell Ballet The Fiddle and the Drum to Ottawa in May.Right after that, the company will launch the Hip show, bringing alive many of the hits that Hip fans adore in a variety of dance styles, songs they have made a part of their lives, such as the ballet’s remarkable opening duet to Scared.

Other remarkable dance settings range from extreme athleticism to balletic grace and include machete fights, a pole dance, and a final gang war, set to such songs as Last of the Unplucked Gems, Gift Shop, Fiddler’s Green, So Hard Done By, Locked in the Trunk of a Car, Little Bones, At the Hundredth Meridian, Fully Completely and Ahead by a Century.

In addition to Joni Mitchell (The Fiddle and the Drum), All of Us is the latest addition to Grand-Maitre’s series of portrait ballets set to the music of iconic singer-songwriters including k.d. lang (Balletlujah), Sarah McLachlan (Fumbling Towards Ecstasy), Elton John (Love Lies Bleeding), and Gordon Lightfoot (Our Canada).